Okay, we're back...

So, a couple of months have gone by.

Sorry.

The thing is that BloomsDay '08 was the premier and test for this project and, I'm happy to say, it went very, very well. There's been terrific response for the potential of this adaptation and some support offered and we've been taking some time to structure things according to that.

You may notice that I'm saying "we" here instead of "I." In the coming weeks I'll be turning over the majority of this blog to Mike Barsanti, my friend and partner in the project. It's our intention to move this blog into a kind of a production model for annotation of the text through each panel of the comic in the hope that it will make some of the more obscure references a bit more clear. It will also serve that way as a conduit for other Joyce fans to tell me exactly what it is I'm doing wrong (I'm still trying to convince myself that this is a good idea).

I'll leave to Mike to introduce himself, but what you'll be seeing here now is the the black&white drawings of each of the images in my adaptation but with his corrections and comments on subtext; the color commentary, if you will.

In the meantime we'll be starting extra little mailing lists to provide readers with web-blasts for when new material is added to the comic. We've been busy setting up our business end of things and, while there is plenty of new material for another installment, I've been focusing my efforts on scripting (or, in comic parlance, "thumbnailing") through the first three chapters of the novel. As many people have warned me, "'Proteus' is a big hurdle." I knew this going in of course, but I didn't think I'd be forced to prove I can jump it in the time trials. I think I can.

One of the things that makes "Proteus" so difficult is the density and specificity of Stephen's references. Trying to understand them and then relate that understanding to others using visual keys is, let's face it, the lynch-pin of how this project works. It brings up a topic Mike, Josh and I have been discussing for awhile now; whether or not the visual interpretation of the novel we're attempting here can serve as a "roadmap for a hypertext," something that allows annotation to coexist with content. We'll be discussing this more and more with Mike involved, but I'm about thirty pages into "Proteus" now, and I haven't left out a single word of the original text. It makes the production seem dauntingly large, but more and more possible.